The Damned — So, Who's Paranoid?

You have to admire Dave Vanian and friends for keeping true to their weird goth/punk roots through four decades, but So, Who's Paranoid? blows. It clocks in at more than an hour and most songs are longer than four minutes, so it's a really tedious album to absorb since the tracks are way too long and certainly don't offer much in terms of variety or intrigue. The grit of the band's seminal singles has long since been chaffed. In its place, we get either generic pop-punk blandness or self-indulgent silliness like "Nature's Dark Passion," a show tune that sounds like the worst moments of Ultravox or Meat Loaf. I'd probably be paranoid (that nobody would buy the album) if I released something like So, Who's Paranoid?. This will certainly alienate longtime fans and the kids of today will probably just laugh at it.

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